If these symptoms continue for more than a month it becomes post-traumatic stress disorder, often associated with soldiers returning from war zones.

In a High Court filing as part of the fight with their insurers, the band state: ‘Upon learning of Miss Scott’s death, Sir Mick Jagger became stricken with grief.

‘Following examination by his physicians, Sir Mick Jagger was diagnosed as suffering from acute traumatic stress disorder. His physicians advised [him] not to perform for at least 30 days.’

The Stones had taken out a £15million policy to cover the costs if they were forced to cancel their tour.

But the underwriters claim that because Miss Scott committed suicide, they do not have to pay out the £8million the band are demanding.

The disclosure is the most revealing insight yet into Jagger’s feelings. He has so far given only one brief interview about Miss Scott’s suicide. In a statement, he said he would ‘never forget her’, adding: ‘I am still struggling to understand how my lover and best friend could end her life in this tragic way.’

Her death has resulted in a bitter insurance battle on two continents, with lawsuits filed in the US and in London.

Jagger was ‘diagnosed as suffering from acute traumatic stress disorder’ after Scott’s death and was advised by doctors not to perform for at least 30 days

~

In July, the Stones sued their insurers in the High Court, alleging that they had ‘failed and refused’ to pay the £8million, and seeking interest and costs on top of that sum.

The eight insurers are led by Cathedral Capital and Talbot 2002 Underwriting Capital Limited, both based in London.

They responded by claiming that Miss Scott’s death was not ‘sudden and unforeseen’ or ‘beyond her control’ and so did not qualify for a payout.

They also claimed it was ‘reasonable to infer Miss Scott had been suffering from a mental illness’ that was ‘traceable to, or accelerated by, a condition for which she had received or been recommended medical attention’.

A pre-existing condition of this kind could affect any payout.

The insurers appeared to dispute the idea that Jagger, 71, was so deeply upset, and claimed that the doctor who diagnosed him had not actually carried out an examination.

They wrote: ‘It does not appear that Sir Mick Jagger was assessed at any time by a qualified psychiatrist or anyone else suitably qualified with sufficient expertise to make a diagnosis of acute stress disorder.’

Court documents revealed that Jagger has 18 people on his insurance policy, including Ms Scott, Jerry Hall, seven children and four grandchildren

The Rolling Stones frontman published a statement on his website soon after L’Wren Scott’s death saying he was struggling to understand why she would end her life

~

The only proof they had seen was a letter from a doctor, who was not a psychiatrist and did not actually see the patient, the papers state.

Last month, the insurers filed a lawsuit in New York’s Federal Court, and subpoenaed Adam Glassman, the executor of Scott’s will, the New York City medical examiner, and Brittany Penebre, her British assistant, in an attempt to gain access to any emails or messages about an ‘actual or alleged attempt at self harm by Miss Scott’ as well as her general mental health, or an ‘actual or alleged suicide attempt’.

Meanwhile in Utah, where Miss Scott grew up, a judge has ruled that the insurers will be allowed to seek documents and testimony from Miss Scott’s brother, Randall Bambrough, to find out more about her mental state.

However, Mr Bambrough told a local newspaper that he had yet to receive a summons.

Miss Scott, a fashion designer and model, was 49 when her body was found in her Manhattan apartment by Miss Penebre. An autopsy confirmed her death was suicide.

Her fashion business had been £4.6million in debt and she had abruptly cancelled her show at London Fashion Week, supposedly due to technical difficulties.

There were also reports she and Jagger had split up, leaving her ‘devastated’, although Jagger’s spokesman denied this. Documents filed at the district court in Salt Lake City, Utah, reveal Miss Scott was on a long list of family on the Stones’ insurance policy.

Also on Jagger’s list were his ex-wives Jerry Hall and Bianca Jagger, former girlfriends, seven children and four grandchildren.

The documents give a fascinating insight into how the insurance policy worked. The revenue for the tour was expected to be £28million, and this could have gone up if 15 extra European dates were added. The insurers agreed to pay out up to 50 per cent in case of tragedy.

A spokesman for the Rolling Stones declined to comment.

Lawyers for the insurers did not return calls for comment.

BUT THEY CAN’T GET COVER FOR HIS BANDMATES’ BOOZING

Hell-raisers: Ronnie Wood and Keith Richards

~

The Rolling Stones may still be going strong, but their court documents reveal that their disgruntled insurers are well aware of the toll taken by years of the rockstar lifestyle.

Hidden among the fine print of their tour insurance policy is a long list of exceptions – health issues for which each member of the ageing band is not covered.

For example, and perhaps not surprisingly, the insurers say they will not pay out if anything happens to guitarist Keith Richards related to ‘alcohol abuse, liver failure and/or disease and osteoarthritis’.

More unusually, anything to do with the injury that he suffered in 2006, when he was hit on the head by a coconut, will not be covered either.

For Ronnie Wood, anything to do with ‘alcohol abuse’ is also not covered. The exemptions for drummer Charlie Watts include any conditions related to the cancer he was diagnosed with in 2004 or his sciatica.

The documents show the band expected to receive £28million for their tour. Just three shows in Japan were worth £9million.

Marianne Faithfull’s Gloriously Reckless Rock ‘n’ Roll Life

The onetime pop ingénue, style icon and muse to the Rolling Stones releases a new album on the 50th anniversary of ‘As Tears Go By’

By

Rich Cohen

Updated Sept. 4, 2014 10:59 a.m. ET

LIVE THROUGH THIS | ‘This is a very personal record about things I’ve been going through with my loved ones,’ Faithfull says of ‘Give My Love to London,’ out this month. ‘It’s about how to get through.’ Illustration by Mats Gustafson

CERTAIN LIVES STAND for an entire era. Cole Porter is the Jazz Age and the crash. Alfred P. Sloan, whose reign at General Motors began when city streets were still rank with manure and ended with them awash in tail fins, is the auto age. Marianne Faithfull, who had her first hit record in 1964, a song written by a 20-year-old Mick Jagger and his friend Keith Richards, is rock ‘n’ roll. She was 17, a primly blond Brit who elicited aristocratic fantasies. Approaching her at a party where members of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were in attendance, Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham said, “I’m gonna make you a star, and that’s just for starters, baby!”

In the ensuing decades, Faithfull lived a multiplicity of lives, riding and, at times, nearly being destroyed by an ecstatic energy she helped unleash. She was the “It Girl.” A pop ingénue in ’64, a headliner in ’65, a torrid one-night stand of Richards’s in ’66, the muse and partner of Jagger for several years, the singer who rejected Bob Dylan, Miss X at the notorious Redlands drug bust in ’67, best friends with model Anita Pallenberg; dabbler in black magic and hallucinogens. She tasted and touched everything that fascinated her baby-boomer demographic. “She was always perceived as someone very brave, very cool and very much self-created,” said British actress Charlotte Rampling. “She’s always been her own woman, in no one’s mold, and it’s very impressive when a person can live that way.”

Faithfull’s life echoed the course of rock ‘n’ roll itself, which started with the playful excitement of sock hops and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers and dead-ended, for a time, in atonal melodies and concept albums—which is just another way of saying “experience.” By the ’70s, she had lost it all and was on the street, a junky cadging a dose. She turned whispery, desperate.

She came back in 1979 with the titanic breakthrough record Broken English, turning her brush with the dark side into music. She had followed the classic trajectory of the hero: the rise to stardom, the split with society, the journey through a shadow land, the return. Through it all, she’s remained an object of fascination, allegedly a subject for iconic songs, among them “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” by the Rolling Stones. When I asked if she was the inspiration behind the Stones’ “Wild Horses,” she said, “I was told so, but that doesn’t mean anything. Musicians do that all the time. ‘This song’s for you, darlin’.’ ”

It’s been 50 years since the release of her first single, “As Tears Go By,” the hit that began it all. A new record—Give My Love to London—will mark the anniversary. If you want to experience the passage of decades, play the new album beside her first numbers. In the early ’60s, her voice was not faux-naïf but the real thing—simple, childlike—which was part of its appeal, the fantasy of innocence corrupted. No one has ever been younger than Faithfull was in 1964. And no one’s ever been older than she is on the new record. She’s a dance-hall singer, moaning in a dive on the edge of town, her voice rough from years of smoking, shouting, staying out all night in the rain—a wisdom-filled rasp. It’s the quality that made those late Frank Sinatra records, after his voice was shot, electrifying. It’s not just the songs you hear; it’s the life—though the song titles alone tell a story: “The Price of Love,” “Give My Love to London,” “Love More or Less,” “I Get Along Without You Very Well.” Here’s a singer with her eyes on the horizon. “This is a very personal record about things I’ve been going through with my loved ones,” she said. “It’s about how to get through.”

Faithfull is 67, splits her time between Dublin and Paris, smokes (e-cigarettes), walks, sings, writes, thinks. Though no longer the sex symbol she once was, she’s still beautiful. I caught up with her by phone in Paris. She’d broken a hip this summer, which, along with another injury, gave her time to reflect. “Six months on your back will do that,” she told me. “You become introverted. You start thinking about things, too many things.”

We talked about her childhood growing up in a small town just north of Liverpool. Her mother was an Austro-Hungarian aristocrat, Baroness Erisso, whose great uncle, Baron Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, wrote Venus in Furs, the book that gave rise to the term masochist; her father was a British intelligence officer in World War II, later a professor of Italian literature. Despite this pedigree, her childhood was tough. Her parents split when she was six years old; there was never much money. Faithfull was educated at a convent, where she learned the basics of this world and the next.

“Were you Catholic?”

“Not originally, no, but I had to become a Catholic. I couldn’t have survived otherwise. I had been a very bright pupil in the sixth form at the convent. I was preparing to go to university or art school or maybe music school. And then—well, I was discovered, for God’s sake! I wouldn’t have been human if I hadn’t wanted to get out of home.”

The first big moment came in 1964, at a launch party for a teen singer named Adrienne Posta, a famous soiree of that swinging London moment; Faithfull’s social circle and her connections to the city’s exploding music scene had brought her to a party where several young rock stars were in attendance. And here comes the Stones’ exotic boy manager, approaching the convent girl through a haze of cigarette smoke. “Andrew f—ing Oldham, excuse my French,” Faithfull recalls, laughing. “He was fascinating. I had never met a man who wore makeup, never met anybody who talked that way: ‘I’m gonna make you a star, baby.’ I had watched Sweet Smell of Success and all those Laurence Harvey films, so I did understand where he got his persona.”

“ “Marianne has always been her own woman, in no one’s mold. It’s very impressive when a person can live that way.” ”

—–Charlotte Rampling

A week later, Faithfull was at a recording session with Oldham and engineer Mike Leander. According to legend, Oldham had locked Jagger and Richards in a kitchen in Chelsea a few months before, saying, “Don’t come out till you’ve written a song.” It took them ages to figure out how to compose for the Stones. Their early numbers were ballads, melancholy tunes. Oldham farmed them out to other clients. “I first heard [“As Tears Go By”] in the studio,” Faithfull said. “It wasn’t meant to be the single; it was meant to be the B side. It was some scam of Andrew’s whereby I was meant to sing an awful song by Lionel Bart. It was obviously wrong. Mike Leander said, ‘Why don’t we try the B side?’ There must’ve been an acetate of Mick and Keith. I heard that once or twice, then went in and sang. It was magic.”

Faithfull has rerecorded that song since, finding new resonance. She’s grown into the song’s sadness as she’s aged.

It is the evening of the day.
I sit and watch the children play.

Does the 50th anniversary strike her as significant, or is it just a number? “It’s very significant,” she said, “because it’s not just that ‘As Tears Go By’ was released; it was also the beginning of a completely different life. It’s when I became a recording artiste, as they say, with an e on the end.”

Faithfull has known Jagger and Richards since she was a girl and they were boys. Brian Jones, a founding member of the Stones, was dead before his 28th birthday, but she knew him in his last days. She was already in a serious relationship with a gallery owner named John Dunbar (his Indica Gallery is where John Lennon and Yoko Ono would first meet). She married Dunbar when she was 18, and the couple had a young son, which did not stop her from hooking up first with Richards, and then, later, in a more meaningful way, with Jagger. For a time, she drifted between Dunbar and Jagger, sometimes bringing her son along, sometimes leaving him behind. By 1967, she was connected in the public mind with Jagger. They were a reigning couple of the era, the F. Scott and Zelda of swinging London. For a time, tired of motels and theaters, she gave up touring for a life inside the Stones’ inner circle—the band had achieved a remarkable fusion of mainstream and avant-garde. They threw parties, took drugs and had so much fun. It was a golden moment that unfurled like a day that seems to never end, until it does.

For Faithfull, the turning point, her Waterloo, came in ’67 with the drug bust at Redlands, Richards’s country home in Sussex, on the southern coast of England. It was a tabloid scandal that stands as a high watermark of the acid age: Jagger and Richards and various hangers-on getting bombed on LSD in the company of a woman who, because she was not named, became the mystery—the Miss X—at the core of it all.

“Redlands was my moment of truth, when I realized I was in a situation I couldn’t stand,” she told me. “It had been fun for a long time, and I guess we all made the mistake: We believed nothing could touch us, completely forgetting about working-class and middle-class envy, how people would feel. It didn’t even occur to me in my arrogance.”

Faithfull was not arrested, but Jagger and Richards and two other friends were. There was a tremendous trial—almost a show trial—that cemented the Stones’ reputation as rock ‘n’ roll outlaws. Jagger and Richards spent a night in prison before public sentiment helped secure their freedom. Crucial was the publication of an editorial in the conservative London Times under the headline, “Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel?” Though she was supposed to be ashamed, Faithfull showed up in court to support Mick and Keith but also to demonstrate her defiance.

Of course, there’s the pose, and then there’s the way you feel. “I got terrible hate letters,” Faithfull told me. “I’ll never forget. The most awful articles in the newspapers. I was only 20. I believed everything, took it all to heart. I got very depressed. Mick and Keith, God bless ’em, went on to be bigger, better, stronger, brighter, more wicked, more naughty, more powerful. But as a woman—it was completely against the rules. We scuttered on for quite a time after that, trying to pretend it was OK and we could still have fun, but I was beginning to feel bad about myself. And then, you know, I got the usual sort of problems every woman gets with Mick Jagger. I simply couldn’t stand it any longer, all the different women and all that stuff.”

The psychic break came in the summer of ’69, when Brian Jones, who’d been kicked out of the band weeks before and was suffering from paranoia, drowned in a swimming pool. This began a run of dead rock stars: Brian, Jimi, Janis, Jim. They were all 27 when they died. After Jones’s death, Faithfull and Jagger flew to Australia to appear in Tony Richardson’s movie Ned Kelly, about an outlaw bank robber. Faithfull took sleeping pills before the flight, took more when she got to the hotel. At some point, she woke up, jet-lagged, walked dead-eyed to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. It was Brian’s face looking back. He beckoned her to join him inside the glass. The windows were sealed, so, instead of jumping, she took a fistful of pills and lay down beside the sleeping rock star.

“It was an awful thing to do to Mick, to Tony Richardson, to my mother, to my little tiny son who was in England, to myself,” she said. “I do remember having these feelings of ‘I’ll show them! They’ll realize when I’m dead they shouldn’t have done that!’ Completely forgetting you’ll be dead! I understood it years later when I had a good shrink in Boston and she gave me an essay Freud wrote on melancholy. In it he describes insanity of the suicide, where the id, the ego and the superego split. That’s when you actually see yourself dying, jumping out the window, whatever it is you choose. And then you’re at your own funeral listening to what people say about you.”

Days went by as she slept. In a dream, she met Brian, who told her how lonely he’d been. She walked him to the edge of nowhere, let him go. She woke up in a hospital with Mick and her mother at her side. “I had taken 150 Tuinals and was unconscious for six days,” she said.

FOR FAITHFULL, the period after the near suicide meant a switch from mind-expanding drugs to opiates, from a quest for experience to a search for numbness, escape. A personal disaster for Faithfull, the hangover that followed the ’60s was also part of a general malaise: Vietnam, the slide into dissolution, Watergate, OPEC, bell-bottoms. At some point, Faithfull became too self-destructive. In her memoir, she recounts a conversation she overheard between Jagger and Ahmet Ertegun, the founder of Atlantic Records. “There’s only one thing to do,” Ertegun told Jagger. “I’ve seen a lot of heartbreak with junkies. Believe me, old friend, it wrecks the lives of everybody around them, as well. It’s a bottomless pit, and she’ll drag you into it unless you let her go.”

“ “Marianne has lived so many lives already, and has many more to live.” ”

—–Yoko Ono

Jagger and Faithfull broke up. A short time later, while in a London taxi, she learned of Jagger’s engagement to Bianca Pérez-Mora Macias. Faithfull got out, got drunk, got arrested, and then spent the night in jail. From there, it was down the rabbit hole that led to the street. She lost touch with friends, family. Most painfully, she lost custody of her son. At times, she seemed like the ragged princess of the Dylan song “Like A Rolling Stone,” strung out on streets she once commanded like a queen. Yet, through it all, she remained true to her quest to sample every kind of experience. “For me, being a junkie was an admirable life,” she wrote later. “It was total anonymity, something I hadn’t known since I was 17. As a street addict in London, I finally found it. I had no telephone, no address. Nobody knew me from Adam.” Somehow, she survived.

When she found her way back in 1979 with Broken English, it was with a new sound, a new voice—gritty, wizened, experienced. “It was another person you heard on that record,” Rampling said. “And it spoke so clearly about what she had been through and how she had lived.” A string of great records followed: Strange Weather; Before the Poison; Easy Come, Easy Go; Horses and High Heels. Her late albums are her best—powerful because they suggest a life beyond music—and stand as a distillation. The pure ingénue at the beginning of the ’60s, the hippie chick by the end; the heroin girl at the beginning of ’70s, the proto-grunge girl at the end—Faithfull has always been a personification of her time.

These days, she stands for the rock ‘n’ roll generation grown old and dignified. “Marianne has lived so many lives already, and has many more to live,” Yoko Ono wrote in response to emailed questions. “She always keeps her chin up. As time goes by, she just gets better and better.” That’s her new record: chaos recollected in the calm after the storm.

“Everyone has to go through it themselves,” Faithfull told me, laughing. “But, just to be kind, I will give you my motto: ‘Never let the buggers grind you down.'”

The tool above comes from Crisis Text Line, a New York-based nonprofit that offers text message counseling to (mostly) teenagers.

Using information from more than 3.3 million texted cries for help, Crisis Text Line’s Bob Filbin was able to chart the prevalence of different issues at different points during the day.

Depression, family issues and self harm struggles tend to manifest in the evening, which, as Dr. Victoria Dunkley noted in Psychology Today earlier this year, might have something to do with sleep-deprived teens bathing in artificial light and never getting enough healing rest.

Substance abuse comes on strongest at the beginning and end of the day: 5 a.m. and 7 p.m.

LGBT issues peak during school hours, which makes some intuitive sense — according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, gay youth were 61 percent more likely than straight youth to report feeling unsafe or uncomfortable due to their sexual orientation and bullying, and a quarter of LGBT youth have skipped classes or whole school days because they said they felt unsafe at school.

Sexual abuse is an all-day struggle, as are suicidal thoughts.

Filbin also created tools to chart psychological struggles throughout the week…

Lublin said that the support and data collection that text-based counseling can offer could “save more lives than penicillin”:

We can help millions of teens with counseling and referrals. That’s great.

But the thing that really makes this awesome is the data. Because I’m not really comfortable just helping that girl with counseling and referrals. I want to prevent this s*** from happening.

So think about a cop. There’s something in New York City. The police did it. It used to be just guess work, police work. And then they started crime mapping. And so they started following and watching petty thefts, summonses, all kinds of things – charting the future essentially. And they found things like, when you see crystal meth on the street, if you add police presence, you can curb the otherwise inevitable spate of assaults and robberies that would happen. In fact, the year after the NYPD put CompStat in place,the murder rate fell 60 percent.

So think about the data from a crisis text line… Imagine having real time data on [bullying and dating abuse and eating disorders and cutting and rape]. You could inform legislation. You could inform school policy.

…

I’m actually really excited about the power of data and the power of texting to help that kid go to school, to help that girl stop cutting in the bathroom and absolutely to help that girl whose father’s raping her.

18 April 1990, DENVER, COLORADO: “Painfully will you get your food from it [the soil] as long as you live. . . . By the sweat of your face will you earn your food, until you return to the ground, . . . So Yahweh God expelled him [Adam] from the garden of Eden, to till the soil. . . .” From those preceding words from Genesis 3: 17-19 (NJB), many people find the root cause of the “W” word—WORK! From that instance of man’s fall from grace and expulsion from Eden to the present day, few would disagree that work has remained essential to the survival of human life.

Work brings the reward of life yet causes pain and frustration in the process, as the Genesis text has shown, and as the Roman poet Lucretius (c. 98-95 B.C.) has further illustrated in the following passage from Book Five of his philosophical poem, On The Nature of Things:

“Unless by turning up the fruitful clods with the share and labouring the soil of the earth we stimulate things to rise, they could not spontaneously come up into the clear air; and even then . . . when things earned with great toil . . . are all in blossom, either the ethereal sun burns them up with excessive heats or . . . the blasts of the winds waste them by a furious hurricane.”

As if it was not excruciating enough to have to labor for existence, a most unfortunate event occurred along the path of civilization to cause labor to become truly torturous. This sad moment in time was illumined by Swiss music teacher and political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his On the Origin of Inequality (1755). He wrote:

“The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying ‘This is mine,’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not anyone have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, . . . and crying . . . the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.”

For the approaching twentieth anniversary of Earth Day, on April 22, 1990, there are, perhaps, no words more ripe than the final fifteen words of the preceding passage by Rousseau.

The birth of the idea of ownership, specifically the owning of land, led to the idea of having others work the land for the owner. This required motivation for others to do the work, which led to slavery (the owning of the workers themselves), which led, ultimately, to a more subtle form of slavery—wage labor.

Today, the owners of the earth are the corporate directors. One of the largest corporations is Time Warner, Inc., which in June of 1989 had a work force of 35,460 employees (The Nation, June 12, 1989). The motivation to labor for these owners is to earn wages with which to buy the fundamental necessities of human survival (blue jeans; mesquite-barbecued fajitas; a Victorian townhome; a Volkswagen; insurance coverage for one’s car, home and life; and so on).

As a further motivation, it is possible to earn beyond one’s needs of survival to one’s wants of comfort, such as a movie (Batman), a magazine (Batman), music (Prince: the Batman soundtrack) or television (Unsolved Mysteries)–all the enjoyable additions to life that just happen to be owned by Time Warner, Inc. or its corporate siblings.

Ownership today has moved far beyond Rousseau’s “piece of ground” to the entire earth, the people of the earth and all that the people of the earth consume—mentally, digestively, and physically. The instrument of ownership today is the system of wage labor, in which people labor to own the right to exist and to experience comfort beyond existence.

The historical progression of labor into wage labor, as the result of the idea of ownership, is also a progression from the simple effects of labor (pain and frustration) into more complex effects of wage labor (torture, anguish and despair). These hellish fruits of wage labor are presently found from the bottom to the top of the work force.

At the lower depths, people struggle simply to exist. Their torture is a fear of the icy gray-tinged human skin that precedes the relief of their death.

Those in the middle struggle to prosper. Their anguish is a fear of the cramps that accompany a shrinking stomach.

At the top, people struggle to tighten the grip on their prosperity. Their despair is twofold: they fear the fall from the “financial high wire” to the abyss of poverty, and they fear the confinement of a prison cell that comes if their methods of reaching the top are deemed foul.

Within the system of wage labor, fear is the prime motivator that causes all laborers to struggle and to suffer the travail of contemplating a possible drop in earnings.

Two effects that branch from this fear of being without income are escape and compromise. On the lower end, some escape into the extreme of crack addiction and some into alcoholism; others escape through suicide. Some compromise their sense of dignity and value by deviating their creative talents in order to pursue the wages necessary for survival and comfort. They compromise through prostitution or by marketing drugs; some even compromise by marketing children.

In the middle, people escape to the endless fantasy worlds found in the movie theatre; they escape to the mall to spend money on a new book or a CD that should be spent for an overdue credit card bill (providing the illusive relief of being prosperously free); they escape to the beguiling freshness of life found in an extra-marital affair, or a divorce. They compromise by cheating on their income taxes, and by lying to their employers by calling in “sick”when they really wanted a day just to kick back and relax.

People at the top are like Donald Trump; they escape to Aspen, Colorado and compromise by giving donations to charity. Their fur coats give them all the warmth necessary to keep them as distant as possible from the icy gray-tinged skin that precedes death.

There are tortures born from the system of wage labor that are of a more personal nature. Nine years ago, my wife and I both worked for oil companies. Our wages soared to new heights. As our income rose, our lifestyle followed suit. We purchased a house in the spring of 1983.

At first, it was simply a piece of ground with a hole dug for the basement. We watched the concrete foundation as it was poured, the wooden framework as it was assembled and the panels of dry wall as they were set into place. We chose the carpeting, the floor tiles and the oak cabinets. We took pictures at least once a week for a before-and-after album. We watched the fence go up.

Then, in 1985, my wife lost her job with Petro-Lewis when they laid off all but a handful of employees. In 1986, I lost my job with Atlantic Richfield Company when they closed their Denver office. As our income from the oil companies evaporated before our eyes, we struggled to replace it with income from other jobs. My wife worked as a daycare provider for infants and toddlers, and I worked as a temporary draftsman for less than half of my oil company salary. As a result of the drastic loss of wages, we eventually filed bankruptcy and lost the house to foreclosure. My wife wept as we drove away from the house and moved into a smaller townhome. I held my tears inside along with the feeling of wanting to put my clenched fist through the nearest plastered wall.

Now, I work eight hours a day (still for less than my oil company salary); I attend night school in order to finish my degree and to push towards a career change; and I spend, with my wife, the little time that is left.

In his treatise of 1762, The Social Contract, Rousseau wrote, “Man is born free, yet he is everywhere in chains.” Today, Rousseau’s words are more valid than ever in our own country that is known ironically as the land of the free.

In the system of wage labor, true freedom does not exist. In its place, there is only the fear that fuels the struggle for earnings, the escape into transient illusions of freedom, and the compromise of human dignity and value for the required dollars that buy what is, in fact, our most fundamental human right—a comfortable existence.

I originally wrote this April 18, 1990. After twenty-three years, I thought I would tune it up a bit and publish it here on the blog, along with the two accompanying essays.

I sent these three essays to Burlington, Vermont’s Brautigan Library, named for Richard Brautigan and initiated by his daughter Ianthe. The essays were among the first (in 1990) accepted, bound and placed on the shelves under the “Mayonnaise System Catalog Number” of: “Social/Political/Cultural: SOC 1990.007.” My accompanying certificate states: “LET NO MAN block the light of wisdom and inspiration found therein.”